Category: President’s Note

Hello RUSA members! I’m very excited to start my year as President of RUSA and to build on all the wonderful work that was accomplished in the past year under the leadership of 2015-16 RUSA President Anne Houston. Thank you to the committees, sections, members and RUSA staff for a successful conference in Orlando, FL. We offered a variety of section sponsored programs, pre-conferences, and socials. The Membership Committee, chaired by Ann Brown, offered RUSA 101 to a full room of library professionals interested in all that RUSA has to offer in the way of engagement, service, and community. The Andrew Carnegie Medals for Fiction and Nonfiction celebration, sponsored by Novelist, was both moving and joyous. Duncan Smith, Co-founder & General Manager of Novelist, has let RUSA know that Novelist will continue to support the Medals by donating $15,000 over a 3 year period for the event which celebrates the best in adult literature. I was unable to attend but I heard that the Literary Tastes Breakfast had an unmatched author’s panel which Leighann Wood, RUSA Senior Program Officer, has written about in this issue of RUSA Update. It was also my great honor to help recognize the recipients of the RUSA Achievement Awards at our annual reception. I appreciate the continued support and sponsorship of the awards reception by Credo Reference and a big thank you to all of RUSA vendor sponsors and supporters. Lastly, there was a full house for the RUSA President’s Program with energetic speaker, Dave Cobb of the Thinkwell Group, who spoke about creating immersive guest experiences in the library through storytelling. There is a great write-up in RUSA News http://rusa.ala.org/blog/2016/07/08/be-our-guest-create-your-own-pixie-dust-at-the-library
There were other key accomplishments this past year:

• Under the leadership of the Organization and Planning (O&P) Committee, chaired by Beth German, RUSA successfully piloted interest groups and three out of the four interest groups will continue as part of RUSA. O&P will make a recommendation to RUSA Board regarding how to integrate interest groups into the RUSA organization on a permanent basis. The interest groups are: Copyright (Faithe Ruiz ruizf@cf.edu), First Year Experience (Douglas Hasty douglas.hasty@fiu.edu), and Shared Collections (Tina Baich cbaich@iupui.edu). The Entrepreneurship IG (Steve Cramer) decided to sunset at the end of the pilot.
• Anne Houston, RUSA Past President, created the Name Change Task Force, co-chaired by Ed Garcia and Nancy Cunningham, which surveyed RUSA members about their views on the RUSA name and brand. We’re expecting a report from the Task Force by Midwinter 2017.
  The Learning Opportunities and Knowledge Coordination (LOKCS) task force, co-chaired by Mary Popp and Shannon Jones, issued an excellent report on RUSA Learning and Publishing http://connect.ala.org/files/1608_RUSA-LOKCS-FinalRpt-Feb2016.pdf which includes a vision and value statement for RUSA Learning. I will be working closely with the Chairs of Publications & Communications, Professional Development, and Standards & Guidelines to begin implementing the recommendations
• Under the leadership of Susan Hornung, RUSA Executive Director, the Executive Committee and Membership Committee brainstormed a value proposition statement for RUSA members as we consider a dues increase to stabilize the RUSA budget.
• RUSA’s ALA Emerging Leaders project led by Catherine Damiani, Digital Services Librarian at East Providence Public Library and RUSA’s Emerging Leader, developed a library publishing services toolkit which will be stewarded by the Publications & Communications Committee
• Patty Valdovinos, RUSA’s Spectrum Scholar, worked with Kirk McLeod, incoming chair of the Publications & Communications, to create and host the IAMRUSA podcast series which, so far, has featured interviews with Anne Houston and Joe Thompson, now RUSA past-past president.
• The RUSA Trends Team was formed and will blog about trends in library user services

Turning to the year ahead, in collaboration with the RUSA Executive Committee and Board, I will continue to work on the strategic goals and objectives of RUSA as outlined in our strategic plan with a particular focus on the following:

• Working with Organization & Planning as the they review the structure of RUSA and the RUSA review process
• Adopting a more flexible pathway for volunteer member engagement (i.e. streamlining ways to get involved with RUSA)
• Implementing the recommendations of the LOKCS task force
• Continuing to develop and deliver timely and engaging conference programming, professional development offerings and a variety of publication channels and venues
• Consider proposal to make RUSQ open access
• Evaluate the effectiveness of RUSA Awards events working closely with the Celia Ross, our new Vendor Relations liaison.
• Offering the successful RUSA 101 and 201 programs and hold more online Town Hall meetings

Please feel free to contact me any time at alemcmanus@ucdavis.edu. I welcome your questions and comments.
Alesia McManus
RUSA President 2016-17

President’s column

Greetings, RUSA members! In my first column as President, I’d like to talk about some possible new directions for RUSA. But first, I want to acknowledge and thank all the committees, sections and members, as well as the RUSA staff, who contributed to the success of RUSA’s programs and events at the Annual Conference in San Francisco. We have much to be proud of. Among other events, we held the RUSA 101 session to educate new members about our organization, honored the recipients of RUSA awards at our Awards Ceremony, and celebrated great writing– while enjoying a talk by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar– at the Carnegie Medal celebration.   RUSA sections sponsored many stimulating programs and discussions, and 2014-2015 RUSA President Joe Thompson brought us an outstanding President’s Program featuring danah boyd. (See Joe’s recap below for more on that.)

So now that the conference is wrapped up and we’re all back at our “normal” jobs and lives, where do we go from here? I’d like to use this column to talk about a major new initiative for RUSA. One of our big tasks in the coming year will be to develop a proposal for the formation of Interest Groups within our association. What do we mean by an “interest group”? Interest groups can be defined in different ways, but the basic concept involves a group of members coming together around a current topic of common interest or concern. Enthusiasm for the idea of Interest Groups within RUSA was clearly expressed by members in responses to the survey done by the RUSA Review Task Force in 2014. The RUSA Review survey asked members this question:

We are considering a new kind of community within RUSA, called Interest Groups. These Groups would be RUSA-wide communities that are organized around popular, current topics, enabling members from across RUSA to connect with others who have shared interests. These groups can hold discussions, email forums, programs and other events. Some topics for Interest Groups may include but are not limited to: Marketing/Outreach, Programming, Library Spaces, and Usability. Are you in favor of adding Interest Groups?

Of the 395 RUSA members who responded to the question, 89 percent answered “yes.” Interest groups are obviously an intriguing idea. Why? An interest group model offers several advantages. Interest groups are formed at the grassroots level, and are relatively bureaucracy-free. They can be formed quickly in response to pressing needs which members may be encountering in their daily work. They offer an easy way for members to get involved. And they can evolve or be disbanded easily when no longer needed, so that members can move on to other Interest Groups or types of involvement.

The RUSA Review survey also asked members for their top choices for possible Interest Groups. In addition to some of the topics mentioned in the survey question–marketing, outreach, programming and space planning– other choices were readers’ advisory and assessment. Many other topics could be proposed, including more specific topics in response to current issues or questions.

In order to move the Interest Groups idea forward, we will need to create some structure with specifics for how Interest Groups should work within RUSA. The Organization & Planning Committee has been tasked with this work, starting with looking at how Interest Groups have been implemented in other ALA divisions. Key questions to be answered include:

• How many members are needed to form an Interest Group? How do they go about forming the group?
• Can non-RUSA members join a RUSA Interest Group?
• Can Interest Groups sponsor programs and discussions at conference?
• How much support from the RUSA office can Interest Groups request? Can they make budget requests?
• How and to whom do Interest Groups report out?
• How is leadership assured from year to year? How are leaders elected or appointed?
• How would an Interest Group be disbanded and how would a decision to disband be made?

As the Organization & Planning Committee investigates these questions, they will work on wording defining Interest Groups to be placed in the RUSA Bylaws (which will require a vote of the membership in the 2016 election cycle) as well as additional details to be included in the RUSA Guide to Policies and Procedures. Please stay tuned for more details on these proposals over the coming months.

The formation of Interest Groups does have a potential downside: it will add further complexity to an already complex organization. Like many ALA divisions, RUSA is highly structured. It already comprises six sections and over 200 committees, including both RUSA-level and Section committees. So as we contemplate Interest Groups, we also need to decide what RUSA can do less of to make time and resources available for Interest Groups. We know that our members are becoming less interested in volunteering for administrative tasks, and more interested in volunteering to be a part of interesting projects and conversations. Along with implementing Interest Groups, can we also streamline and downsize our administrative work? This is a key question that we will have to answer.

I welcome your comments on these questions and proposed changes. Please feel free to contact me any time at annehouston2@gmail.com.

Anne Houston
RUSA President 2015-2016

Annual Conference 2014 Wrap Up and a Look Ahead

Although some of us may have gone in with concerns or even trepidation about what an ALA Annual Conference in Las Vegas might turn out to be like, many of us found the conference content and overall experience to be on par with the best. I’d like to begin this RUSA Update with a review of some of my stand-out experiences at ALA Annual 2014. I’ll then turn to the future, with a look ahead at online learning being offered by RUSA this fall and a review of some activities going on right now that will take us into RUSA’s next strategic planning process.

Before going any further I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Elizabeth Stephan for serving RUSA as the RUSA Update Editor for over 5 years. Elizabeth was responsible for moving this newsletter, RUSA Update, to a completely electronic publishing platform and for positioning RUSA Update to serve as a major online service to RUSA members. With this issue we welcome Carol Schuetz as our new RUSA Update Editor. Carol comes to us after previously serving as the editor and production editor of the Library Instruction Round Table (LIRT) Newsletter and most recently as the editor of BRASS Notes.   We appreciate her now sharing her skills with us at RUSA Update. Welcome, Carol!

I also want to thank our over 900 volunteer members who serve as chairs and members on all of our committees at the section and division levels. Every member who prepares agendas, takes minutes, participates in discussions, and responds to emails with ideas is directly responsible for the success of the division. We are all pulled in many directions by a plethora of commitments, but our member volunteers each find a way to make an individual contribution that benefits us and the larger profession. Among our volunteer members I absolutely must recognize are my immediate predecessors, Kathleen Kern and Mary Popp, who have responsibly guided RUSA and contributed innumerable hours in support for the association and our members. I’m especially grateful to our past presidents for their time, dedication, and for always caring about doing the best job possible. Thank you.

Annual Conference 2014 Wrap Up

It is very hot in Las Vegas, that’s true. Once you’re indoors, it can be confusing to navigate through the smoky seas of slot machines on your way to a meeting. That said, those will be the memories that I know I will selectively forget. What I won’t forget are the people, the programs, and the RUSA events. In this issue of RUSA Update you will see reports from many of our division and section committees on their activities. Though I wish I could have attended them all, here I’m only going to focus on those that I was lucky enough to attend.

I’d like to first highlight some of the important social opportunities – those places where people interested in joining the division have the chance to informally connect with established members. The first notable event was Friday afternoon’s RUSA 101. We welcomed over 100 people who wanted to know more about RUSA. Each of our six sections had representatives stationed around the perimeter of the room and were able to make personal connections. I want to especially thank RUSA Membership co-chairs Ann Brown and Alicia Ahlvers, as well as Marianne Braverman and Leighann Wood from the RUSA office for pulling the event together. One highlight for me was getting to meet four reference librarians from Nigeria who came to ALA specifically to attend our RUSA events and programs!

Did you know that the STARS section is now 10 years old? The members planned a great celebration and networking event at the local Bahama Breeze on Friday evening. It was a blast getting to talk with people that I’d served with previously on committees and meet new people. Almost all of the STARS chairs — past, present, and future– were in attendance able to be photographed together.

Saturday offered multiple opportunities for making connections with RUSA colleagues. Bright and early were the RSS Open House and All-Committee meeting, where I was able to meet with my RSS colleagues, including members of the Young Adult Reference Services Committee (“YARS!” – say it like it’s “Talk-Like-a-Pirate Day”). YARS is our first joint committee with YALSA. The members are already doing great work delivering programs and discussions that delve into the methods we use to connect young adults with reference services. On Saturday evening MARS offered their signature social event, the MARS Happy Hour. I really want to commend the organizers of this long and successful series. It was another great opportunity to connect with fellow “MARStians.” BRASS, CODES, and History also held great networking events, but I’m sorry I missed them this time around. There’s always Midwinter and Annual next year! In addition to being a lot of fun, one thing that all of these social events have in common is that they provide our members who attend conference excellent opportunities to talk informally about their work in RUSA, to share personal experiences across library types, and make connections that could lead to the next career advancement.

Among the headline RUSA events was Kathleen Kern’s RUSA President’s Program, Our Values, Ourselves: Examining Our Values and What Others Value About Us. The “Waynes” (Wayne Bivens-Tatum and Wayne Wiegand), Lisa Carlucci Thomas, and Jeanne Goodrich each provided personal reflections on the development of the modern library service structure and influence of past precedents on libraries today.

RUSA again offered great opportunities to meet authors and hear from them directly. Held on Saturday evening, this was the third year for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction and also the third year that Nancy Pearl chaired the selection committee. You can find out more about the 2014 winning titles Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism at http://www.ala.org/awardsgrants/carnegieadult. I’m now on page 45 of The Bully Pulpit and making steady progress! Though this was Nancy’s last year as chair, the 2015 award committee is in great hands for the coming year. It will be chaired by Brad Hooper of ALA Booklist and has a membership representing both RUSA and Booklist. Then, on Sunday morning, I saw some of the same people from the night before at the Literary Tastes Author Program: Celebrating the Best Reading of the Year. Though I ran late from a very early morning meeting I was able to slip into the back of the room to hear two out of three of our authors speak. You can find out more about their books at http://www.ala.org/rusa/awards/literarytastes.

On Sunday afternoon we held our annual RUSA Awards Reception, where we were able to honor the achievements of our colleagues who have excelled in the field of reference and user services. See the RUSA Blog at

http://rusa.ala.org/blog/2014/03/07/2014-achievement-award-winners for details about those who were recognized.

The RUSA Board met twice, on Saturday and Monday afternoons. Key accomplishments included the passage of the FY2015 operating budget and reserve fund proposal as recommended by RUSA’s Budget and Finance Committee. The allocations from the reserve fund will allow RUSA to continue its efforts related to member recruitment and retention, which includes funding for a high-profile speaker at the 2015 Annual Conference, growing the Just Ask campaign, and contracting for strategic planning consulting services. Approved expenditures also provide support for History section’s visit to Angel Island on the Friday of Annual Conference 2015 in San Francisco. RUSA members will be able to learn about the island’s role as the Ellis Island of the west. The Board also approved the slate of 2015 RUSA programs for San Francisco as presented by the RUSA Conference Program Coordinating Committee.

A Look Ahead

Our RUSA Committees are now at work making plans for the 2014-2015 year. I’d like to first recognize the members of the RUSA Professional Development Committee for reviewing proposals and coordinating the process for approving our slate of fall 2014 online courses. You can find these at http://www.ala.org/rusa/development/onlinece. Over at the RUSA Membership Committee, they will be involved in supporting RUSA’s member recruitment efforts through monthly RUSA 101 orientation webinars and by connecting our sponsored student members with experienced RUSA members who will be available to serve as mentors.

Our current RUSA strategic plan will come to a conclusion in June 2015. Therefore, the upcoming year will offer us a great opportunity to reflect and define how we will move forward providing our members the experience that they desire. A key focus for us will be on the value proposition for our members. Over the long term, what are those experiences that RUSA offers our members that make each person want to continue as a member? Equally important, what are those experiences that encourage new members to join? How can we show that nobody else can provide this same value proposition?

Important member data that will help to inform the strategic planning process is being compiled through the work of the RUSA Review Task Force. I especially want to thank the co-chairs Chris LeBeau and Diane Zabel for their leadership and for preparing a preliminary report for the RUSA Board for the ALA Annual Conference 2014. Their work continues through an online survey. From mid-June through late July the RUSA Review: Summer 2014 Survey of our Members was posted with 406 members completing the survey. The Task Force members are currently reviewing the results.

The next steps for strategic planning are to bring together members of RUSA Board and RUSA Organization and Planning Committee to create a Strategic Planning Coordinating Task Force. The group will work with the RUSA office staff to contract for strategic planning consulting services. In addition to using the data that has already been gathered, we are tentatively planning on using the face-to-face opportunity that ALA Midwinter 2015 in Chicago will offer for a facilitated discussion with the members of the RUSA Board. A targeted online survey of all RUSA members during the process will provide us with additional information about what our members desire from their RUSA experience. This timeline will allow us to complete a new plan before the ALA Annual Conference 2015 in San Francisco.

What’s next? If you are able to attend both ALA Midwinter 2015 in Chicago and ALA Annual 2015 in San Francisco, you’ll want to mark your calendar for September 9^th when bundled registration for both conferences opens. See http://www.ala.org/conferencesevents. Regular registration for the ALA Midwinter Meeting opens on October 1. What does RUSA offer at ALA Midwinter you may ask? Though we don’t offer formal programs, we do provide attendees many opportunities to network and share ideas through the RUSA Social, RUSA Book and Media Awards, and Discussion Forums organized by the RUSA sections.

Best wishes to all of our RUSA members for a fantastic fall!

-Joe

Joseph Thompson
RUSA President 2014-2015

For many of us, the fall is the start of a new year: a new academic year for ourselves or our children, a post-vacation or post-summer-reading-program year, and the start of a new RUSA year. We have new committees, new programs, new online learning opportunities, newly elected leaders, and new initiatives. In many ways, one season blends into the next and one year becomes another without much fuss. Certainly there are continuing initiatives in RUSA, but I’ll give you a look at some of what is new.

Tuesdays from 2:00-3:00 PM Central, I will hold an “open office hour” in Adobe Connect. As President, one of my goals is to make it easier to work with RUSA and easier to be a part of everything that we have going on. Look for the link to the Adobe Connect room to be announced on the RUSA-L listserv* and the RUSA Facebook page and website. I will also be available during this time via telephone 649-9174 (area code 217). You can, of course, email me or call at other times, but 2:00-3:00 on Tuesdays I am dedicated to your questions and your ideas. I will be joined selected weeks by a member of the RUSA office who can also answer your RUSA questions and we will announce in advance who will be present

IAmRUSA is a new interactive member-of-the-week being worked on by Kirk MacLeod, RUSA Spectrum scholar along with two or three fabulous RUSA mentors. Each week one member, or person of interest to RUSA such as a RUSA award-winning author, will present a brief profile on ALA Communities and then field questions about her job. ALA Communities allows a threaded discussion, so people will be able to post questions, receive responses, and engage in asynchronous conversations with the profiled member and each other. ALA Communities requires registration but is free, so this will be a good way to reach non-RUSA members and library school students to spread the word about the meaningful—and often fun—work of user services and reference librarians and staff. If you are interested in helping to organize IAmRUSA or in being a member of the week, please contact MacLeod at (kgmcleod@ualberta.ca).

More online learning! This past year RUSA sections and members were active with offering webinars and online courses. We offered five webinars and eighteen online courses reaching over 500 learners. Our members (and non-members) are eager for opportunities to learn from RUSA’s experts and we are increasing our online learning offerings. This past year was our first foray into the 1-1.5-hour webinar format and there interest in adding more topics. Our four-week courses continue to be strongly attended as well with many offered additional times due to continuing demand. We have an open-call for webinars for the fall and online courses for the spring (deadline for both is September 1.) See the list of the currently scheduled (more to come!) webinars and courses.

RUSA was awarded a Sparks! Ignition grant from IMLS for the project: National Guidelines and Best Practices for Financial Literacy Education (FLE). This work will be carried out by BRASS (Business Reference and Services Section). This initiative dovetails nicely with the existing SmartInvesting@YourLibrary grant from the FINRA foundation and addresses a very timely topic in the lives of our library users. Congratulations to RUSA and BRASS!

This year we moved to the Adobe Connect platform for our online meetings and webinars. This is not to be confused with the ALA Connect platform for asynchronous communications and committee documents. (Sort of like journals with similar names, there ought to be a rule against naming products this closely!) Virtual and between-conference committee meetings can be held in Connect or via conference call. Here is how to arrange a meeting online or via conference call. ALA is using the Adobe Connect platform so the move takes advantage of pricing and support offered by ALA.

Leadership development is something that we all need in our careers. RUSA recognizes the need for growth at all levels of your career. To start, we are focusing on early to mid-career librarians who are active RUSA volunteers. After we have developed within this scope, RUSA will expand the foci and reach to new librarians, later-career librarians, and all of RUSA membership. Gary White, RUSA past-President, is leading this initiative. Connect with Gary White (gww2@umd.edu) if you are interested in volunteer to help work on this program of activities, if you have ideas on content that we should offer, or are an experienced librarian/committee chair who would like to provide mentorship or online leadership training to newer leaders. My fall RUSQ column also focuses on Leadership Development and Mentoring with tips on being a mentor and on being a mentee.

Every year brings new leadership within RUSA. Here are the elected RUSA and Section officers for this year. Newly elected Vice-President Joe Thompson and Secretary Erin Rushton and newly elected Directors-at-Large Margaret Ellingson and Louise Feldmann. Continuing on the Executive Committee are Jennifer Boettcher, RUSA Councilor, and Mary Popp, RUSA Past-President. On the RUSA Board Cynthia Levine, Celia Ross, Doris Anne Sweet, and Patrick Wall, are Directors-at-Large. The 2013-2014 RUSA Board of Directors also includes section chairs: Andy Spackman (BRASS), Asia Gross (CODES), Michelle Baildon (History), Sam Stormont (MARS), Ann K. G. Brown (RSS), and Nora Dethloff (STARS). Congratulations, too, to the new section Vice-Chairs/Chairs Elect: Todd Hines (BRASS), Deborah Abston (CODES), Jenny Presnell (HS), Stephanie J. Graves (MARS-ETS), Qiana Johnson (RSS), Christina “Tina” Baich (STARS).

Annual 2013 in Chicago was a whirlwind of RUSA activities, far too many to mention them all. The RUSA President’s program was attended by over 650 people and featured Lee Raine from the Pew Internet Trust and was followed-up the next day with an expert panel. Watch and listen online if you missed this program. We hope in the future to be able to capture more sessions for later viewing and are working with ALA Conference Services. For a full list of RUSA programs and events at Annual 2013, see the ALA Scheduler, links to program slides and handouts may be available in the comments section at the end of the program description.

As with the Academy Awards, there are so many people to thank. This is also a list of people that you might want to get to know, if you don’t already, as they know a lot about RUSA and libraries.

• Thank you to Mary Popp, outgoing RUSA President (now Past-President), Gary White, Past President, and Carolyn Larson, Secretary, for being people who offer good counsel and get things done.
• Thank you to the outgoing members of the RUSA Board of Directors: Chris LeBeau (BRASS), Dianna McKellar (MARS), Alesia McManus (Director at Large), Amber Prentiss (Director at Large), Janice Schultz (History), Liane Taylor (RSS), Barry Trott (Past President), and Heather Weltin (STARS).
• Thank you to every volunteer in every part of RUSA! RUSA does nothing without you.
• Thanks to the RUSA office for supporting the work of RUSA: Executive Director, Susan Hornung; Andrea Hill, web services manager; Liz Markel, marketing and programs manager; and Leighann Wood, membership assistant.
• Thanks to Barry Trott for successfully moving Reference and User Services Quarterly (RUSQ) to online-only and a great first-year as editor of our esteemed journal.
• Thank you, Liane Taylor, for your hard work in supporting Blackboard Collaborate for online meetings and webinars and for helping us with the transition to Adobe Connect.
• And thank you to all of the RUSA members who support what we do through their membership and their attendance at RUSA events at conference and online.

Making it (even) easier to volunteer Members are what make RUSA work. It is trite, but true. Our programs, our webinars, our courses, our guidelines, our awards, our social functions: everything is based on member ideas and member work. Sometimes, though, people don’t have the ability to volunteer for an entire year of committee work. And sometimes we don’t have room on the committees for all of the volunteers, since a too-large committee is unwieldy. We are working with RUSA Office and some of the committees on short-term and micro-volunteer opportunities. Look for the announcements about those on RUSA-L. The RUSA Legislative Assembly Reps have already launched a call for volunteers to help with advocacy for legislative issues. If you did not see that call but have a passion around in legislation that affects libraries, please contact Alesia McManus at amcmanus@howardcc.edu

Anyone can have a good idea, share yours! A lot of what we do comes from committees and sections, but RUSA also serves members who are not committee members. I know that many people do not have the time to volunteer or put their volunteer efforts elsewhere. Suggesting an activity or topic area for RUSA doesn’t mean that we will make it your responsibility. So, stop into my weekly Tuesday office hour or send me an email. The email inboxes of the rest of the RUSA Board (named above) are also open.

Have a great year!
Kathleen

M. Kathleen Kern
RUSA President 2013-2014

Happy Fall! I am writing this in the heat of summer and I hope that by the time you are reading this message, it will be cooler and wetter in most places. The Annual Conference in Anaheim was a resounding success and RUSA had a number of wonderful programs as well as productive meetings. Topics covered in our programs included: making decisions about e-books, international interlibrary loan, return on investment (ROI) for virtual reference, the 1940 Census, library services to Baby Boomers and older adults, discovery systems, integrating social media and online marketing, business data sources, and many more The MARS Chair’s Program was selected this year to serve also as the President’s Program. Entitled Library in Your Hand: Mobile Technologies for Exchanging Information with Patrons, it provided an overview of the advantages of communication with library users through mobile devices, presented by Joan Lippincott, and descriptions of exemplary programs at North Carolina State University (Kristin Antelman) and Topeka Public Library (David Lee King) A video of the program is available from the RUSA web site at http://www.ala.org/rusa/rusa-presidents-program-video. It is posted in two parts.

RUSA 101, our introduction to new members, was a rousing success. The room had to be changed because so many people indicated in the Scheduler that they planned to attend and the new room was filled to capacity. The excitement was strong! Congratulations to Liane Taylor and her committee for their wonderful session.

This year, we experimented with the venerable Literary Tastes program. This program has traditionally featured authors and free books. Instead of a paid breakfast, this year it was a RUSA program. I really wished that I could have the authors who spoke talk to incoming freshmen at my university. They spoke with passion about their work and their research, making their books and the work of writing them come alive. We were pleased to feature: Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus; Candice Millard, author of Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President; Mark Adams, author of Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time; and Russell Banks, author of Lost Memory of Skin (and a shortlisted title on the Carnegie Award fiction list).

One might call 2011-2012 the Year of Awards. With Booklist and the support of the Carnegie Corporation, RUSA co-sponsored the first-ever awards for the best work of fiction and of non-fiction for adults published in the United States in the previous year. This year’s inaugural winners were: Anne Enright who was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for her novel The Forgotten Waltz, published by W. W. Norton & Company. Robert K. Massie was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction for Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, published by Random House. We salute them both.

The other nominated works were great books as well. Check out the full list under About the Awards.

RUSA gives out many awards each year at the Annual Conference—to RUSA members, to libraries and librarians for excellence in service, to authors and publishers. The full list can be found on the RUSABlog. Please join me in congratulating all of the winners.

This year RUSA sections created two new awards, the BRASS Business Expert Press Award for Academic Librarians and Gale Cengage History Research and Innovation Awards.

We said thank you and “well done” to our outgoing Reference and User Services Quarterly (RUSQ) editor, Diane Zabel, as she ended her term and welcomed the new editor, Barry Trott.

Under the leadership of Gary White, 2011-2012 RUSA President and the Executive Committee, the RUSA Board developed a new three-year (2012-2015) Strategic Plan. The plan focuses on membership and membership benefits, professional development, marketing and outreach, and increasing the effectiveness of RUSA as an organization.

A subcommittee (Alicia Ahlvers, Emily Hamstra, and Emily Kornak) reviewed the results of last year’s RUSA membership survey and made recommendations to the Board. They were a good complement to the RUSA Structures Task Force Report from the committee chaired by Kate Kosturski presented to the RUSA Board at Midwinter. We will use this information as we move forward on the RUSA strategic plan.

Welcome New Leaders
This summer our newly elected officers and Board members are beginning their work of planning for activities that will occur over the next year. Congratulations to Kathleen Kern, Vice-President/President-Elect, new Directors-at-Large Cynthia Levine and Celia Ross, and new Division Councilor Jennifer Boettcher. Continuing on the Executive Committee are Carolyn Larson, RUSA Secretary, and Gary White, RUSA Past-President. On the RUSA Board Wayne Bivens-Tatum, Judy L. Solberg, Doris Anne Sweet, and Patrick Wall, are Directors-at-Large. The 2012-2013 RUSA Board of Directors also includes section chairs: Ann Fiegen (BRASS), Mary M. D. Parker (CODES), Sara E. Morris (History), Deborah K. Bezanson (MARS), Sarah Hammill (RSS) and David Atkins (STARS). I look forward to working with them as we plan for your programs and services in RUSA this year.

Congratulations, too, to the new section Vice-Chairs/Chairs Elect—Andy Spackman (BRASS), Asia Gross (CODES), Michelle Baildon (History), Sam Stormont (MARS), Ann K. G. Brown (RSS), and Nora Dethloff (STARS).

Plans for the Coming Year
Our first steps in the coming year will be to look at the new Strategic Plan and develop action plans to move forward on important parts of the plan. Using some of our reserve funds, we have put our money where our priorities lie, bringing Collaborate web-conferencing software into play for webinars, committee meetings, and many other things we haven’t yet dreamed. We also will sponsor a separate President’s Program. Mary Mintz and Joe Thompson are hard at work with their excellent committee to bring you a program that will dazzle!

This year I plan to begin a comprehensive look at our continuing education, publications (including the web site), communications with members, and programming to see if we can identify priorities, fill gaps, and meet your needs.

Huge Thank You!
This would not be a proper initial message without saying thank you to many wonderful people!

• Thank you to Gary White, who led RUSA over the last year so that it accomplished many goals and began initiatives leading to changes that will make RUSA more responsive to members. I also send a personal thank you to Gary for his kind and patient guidance.
• Thanks to outgoing RUSQ editor Diane Zabel. She charted a course that has led to a newly revitalized and online journal.
• Thank you to outgoing members of the Executive Committee who have worked so hard, Barry Trott, Past President, and Kathleen Kern, RUSA Councilor.
• Thank you to the outgoing members of the RUSA Board of Directors: Chris LeBeau (BRASS), Dianna McKellar (MARS), Alesia McManus (Director at Large), Amber Prentiss (Director at Large), Janice Schultz (History), Liane Taylor (RSS), Barry Trott (Past President), and Heather Weltin (STARS).
• Kudos and thanks to RUSA Executive Director, Susan Hornung, and her staff, Andrea Hill, Liz Markel, and Leighann Wood, who kept us together and always give tremendous effort to RUSA.
• Thank you to every committee chair and every committee member in each of our sections and on our standing RUSA committees for their hard work! The summary above can only just hit the highlights. All of these folks gave their best all through the year. Bravo!
• And to all of you who are so loyal to RUSA, we are grateful for your participation and your confidence in RUSA.

Asking for YOUR Ideas
Other plans are in the works and will take shape over the coming year. You will hear more about them in later issues of the RUSA Update. I strongly encourage all RUSA members to share ideas with me or any other member of the RUSA Board. I can be reached at popp@indiana.edu and I look forward to hearing from you.

Mary Pagliero Popp
RUSA President 2012-2013

Hello everyone! The ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans was a great time to get together for informative programs, exciting events, to meet new people, and to catch up with old friends. RUSA continued its excellent record of high quality programs with four preconferences, sponsored by BRASS, MARS, RSS, and History, and through many other section programs on topics such as readers’ advisory, virtual reference, assessment, and marketing. Highlights of the conference included the CODES annual Literary Tastes Breakfast and the annual RUSA Awards program where we were able to recognize outstanding members of RUSA.

Please join me in congratulating our newly elected officers of RUSA: Mary Popp, Vice-President/President-Elect; Patrick Wall and Doris Ann Sweet, Directors-At-Large; and Carolyn Larson, RUSA Secretary. Mary will be working to solicit volunteers for many RUSA level committees in the coming year so please consider volunteering. Congratulations also to all of our newly elected section officers! (A complete list is on the RUSA Blog).

During the coming year, RUSA will be developing its new three-year strategic plan with the broad goals of increasing membership; better meeting user needs and interests; facilitating member participation; and making the best use of RUSA committee and board meeting time. A taskforce has been set up with representation from each section to develop recommendations for how RUSA can structure itself to meet these needs, and we will solicit input from membership throughout the coming year. RUSA is also working on software and procedures to enable more virtual participation in programs, webinars and meetings. Please contact me with your ideas and suggestions on ways that we can continue to improve RUSA.

I would like to thank RUSA’s outgoing President, Barry Trott, for his leadership and for his guidance as I prepared to step into this role. I’d also like to thank the other members of the RUSA Executive Committee, Susan Beck, Kathleen Kern, and Theresa Mudrock, for all of the help and support. I’m looking forward to working with our outstanding Board in the coming year and would like to offer my thanks to RUSA members who offer their expertise through leadership and service in the many RUSA and section level committees. Finally, I’d like to give a special thanks to Susan Hornung, Executive Director, who continually keeps me on track and who makes sure that RUSA is running smoothly and efficiently. I also want to thank both Liz Markel, Marketing Specialist, and Andrea Hill, Web Services Manager, for all of their support. RUSA is able to function thanks to the hard work of these three people.

After serving in RUSA for nearly twenty years, I am continually impressed with our members’ passion for reference and user services and for the camaraderie and friendship that I see throughout the division. I am humbled and proud to have this chance to serve as President. I’m looking forward to seeing many of you in Dallas in 2012!

Gary White
RUSA President